This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
If we want to know what happiness is we must seek it, not as if it were a part of gold at the end of the rainbow, but among human beings who are living richly and fully the good life. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double Dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar gold button that has rolled under the cupboard in his bed room. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living 24 crowded hours of the day. If you live only for yourself you are always an immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests. No one has learned the meaning of living until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellowmen. If your ambition has the momentum of an express train at full speed, if you can no longer stop your mad rush for glory, power, or intellectual supremacy, try to divert your energies into socially useful channels before it is too late. For those who seek the larger happiness and greater effectiveness open to human beings there can be but one philosophy of life, a philosophy of constructive altruism. The truly happy man is always a fighting optimist. Optimism includes not only altruism but also social responsibility, social courage and objectivity. The good life demands a working philosophy as an orientating map of conduct. This is the golden way of life. This is the satisfying life. This is the way to be happy though human.
Altruism | Ambition | Courage | Danger | Day | Death | Ego | Fighting | Gold | Good | Happy | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Optimism | Philosophy | Service | Will | Writing | Ambition | Danger | Happiness |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with man heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.
Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
Bigotry has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel.
David Grayson, pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker
Happiness, she loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self sacrifice. She will be found not is palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories; and hovering over littered desks; she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child.
David Grayson, pseudonym of Ray Stannard Baker
Happiness is a rebound from hard work. One of the follies of man is to assume that he can enjoy mere emotion. As well try to eat beauty. Happiness must be tricked. She loves to see men work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. She will not be found in the palaces, but lurking in cornfields and factories, and hovering over littered desks. She crowns the unconscious head of the busy child.
Beauty | Man | Men | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Will | Work | Happiness |
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
A young man, to achieve, must first get out of his head any notion either of the ease or rapidity of success. Nothing just happens in this world; everything is brought about. Success never comes to a man of its own volition; it will meet a man halfway, but it will never come to him all the way.
The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
Equality | Inequality |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Art raises its head where creeds relax.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man.
You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction.